Political Quotes

“To my colleagues in this great House, my name is Chuck Fleischmann. I represent the Third District of Tennessee, which has a great city. That city is Oak Ridge, the birthplace of the Manhattan Project. My colleagues, Oak Ridge has a great history. We won the Cold War there, and we won World War II there, but this was a time that the Federal Government in the manufacturing of nuclear weapons was not as careful as it could have been. We didn't know. We had to win those wars--and we did--but as a result of that legacy, we have a problem. Doc Hastings, my colleague from Washington, talked about the problem in Hanford--and there are 500 square miles in Hanford that need to be cleaned up--but in my community in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, there are populations of churches, schools, people all around in a highly condensed area. We have there, across the DOE complex, a tremendous legacy that needs to be cleaned up, and I want to talk about that briefly. We've got nuclear waste that needs to be cleaned up across the complex, and that's being done. We also have a mercury problem. There is an estimated 2 million pounds of mercury in the soil and in the water. This is a real problem for American citizens. This is a Federal obligation to clean this legacy up. There is no question about that. Across this great Nation, whether it's in Oak Ridge, at the Savannah River, in Hanford, or in Idaho, we have an obligation to the American people to clean this up.…”